


The Captain and Her Boy

by lizznotliz



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 06:50:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13852329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizznotliz/pseuds/lizznotliz
Summary: Captain America: The First Avenger AU where Steve and Peggy switch roles: Peggy goes through Project Rebirth and Skinny Steve stays on as her liaison/strategist/whatever at the SSR.





	The Captain and Her Boy

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a few years ago, completely forgot about it, and just found it again recently in an old email draft. Thought it was time to post it here. ;)

Her limbs feel heavier, longer. When she looks at her hands, she knows they’re hers because she can see the scar on her palm from when she broke a glass at the age of twelve, but other than that they’re entirely foreign. She grew a good six inches - there’s a seamstress downstairs already taking out the hems in all of her skirts - and she towers over Rogers now; she suddenly understands what he meant about women not wanting to dance with a man they might step on. She thought he was small before but now he just looks breakable, particularly when she doesn’t feel quite comfortable with her new body yet. He hovers at her shoulder, carefully reading the file in his hands.

He hasn’t looked at her once since she was moved to the exam room.

“Is it really so bad?”

“I beg your pardon?” He raises his eyebrows but doesn’t raise his head.

“You haven’t even glanced at me since I got out of Stark’s infernal machine and they brought me up here so I must ask: do I really look so bad now? Stop memorizing my file and answer me, Rogers.”

He looks up finally, his hollow cheeks stained pink. “You don’t look bad,” he offers quietly.

“But I’m unrecognizable,” she guesses. She feels like it.

“Hardly. I mean, yes, you are bigger now - taller, I mean - you look great, not just beautiful, I mean you are, but that’s not what got enhanced– I didn’t mean _enhanced_ , I meant–”

“Rogers!”

“Your eyes,” he stutters. “Your eyes are the same. I know you’re you. I’d know you anywhere.” He blushes again and hides behind the file, then adds self-deprecatingly: “Guess I still don’t know how to talk to women, huh?”

“You’re doing better,” she tells him but then the nurses walk in to take blood samples and she misses the slow grin that crawls across his face.

 

 

 

 

“She’s not gonna need the shield,” Howard argues. “She’ll be going in behind the Commandos. _They_ will be her shield.”

“Stark, you’re completely mad if you think Captain Carter is going to let anyone but herself lead that team. She’s going to be first through the door every single time.”

“I’m not saying the Captain isn’t qualified,” Howard says, raising his hands innocently. Steve Rogers will never be physically intimidating but Howard admires the defensive anger that’s thrumming through the man’s small body. “I’m saying the Howling Commandos are men who are still trying to get used to having a woman in charge.”

“And I think you need to give my men a little more credit,” she says, stepping into the room and startling Howard so badly he jumps a foot in the air. “What idea of yours is Stark rejecting, Rogers?”

Steve holds up the prototype shield he found amongst Howard’s things. “I saw the footage from your last mission,” he says, “and I watched the way you snatched up that broken door and used it to cross that open field. I thought maybe you’d like to have something more permanent.”

“It’s light,” she says, tossing it between her hands. Then, to Howard: “Vibranium?”

“All we have left.”

She pulls a pistol from her belt and hands it to Steve. “Test it for me, would you, Rogers?”

Howard’s eyes bulge and he jumps in between them: “What? _No!_ No, this is a terrible idea: we haven’t tested that model yet and Rogers is a terrible shot–”

Steve raises the pistol and squares his feet; Howard shrieks and falls to the floor with his hands over his head. Captain Carter ducks behind the shield and the vibranium sings when Steve fires three shots against it.

“Yes, that will do nicely,” she declares, then tosses the shield back to a wide-eyed, trembling Howard. “Put that with the rest of my things, Stark. Nice call, Rogers.” She saunters out of the room and Steve grins down at Howard smugly.

“The hell was that?” Howard mumbles.

“She’s been teaching me to shoot,” Steve confesses.

 

 

 

 

Successful mission or not, Captain Carter disobeyed more orders than usual before she and the Howling Commandos made it back to camp this time. She received a hero’s welcome as she walked through the tents earlier that day, but Steve knows she got her ass handed to her by Phillips behind closed doors.

He was on the other side of the door.

No one else knows - guessed, maybe, the Commandos are smarter than they look - but they’re all giving her a wide berth tonight at the pub anyway; there’s a ring of empty tables around her and she’s nursing a whisky alone in the corner. If he didn’t have a message from Stark, he would leave her alone, too.

“Captain Carter?” He winces at the way his voice cracks. He’s not scared of her. He doesn’t ever want her to feel like he is.

“I’m fed up with men today, Rogers,” she declares, throwing back the rest of her drink. She can’t get drunk, but that’s never stopped her from trying to drink the Commandos under the table. Apparently it doesn’t stop her from attempting to drown her sorrows as well.

“I can come back.”

He’s only taken half a step back when she reaches out a hand, stalling him. “No, it’s… you’re fine. You, I don’t mind. It’s the rest of them.”

He smiles ruefully: “I know I’m small, but I am still a man.” The smile drops. “No, wait, that came out– I didn’t mean it like _that_ –”

“I know you didn’t,” she laughs. “That’s why you can stay.”

 

 

 

 

Steve is in Colonel Philips office taking notes while they watch the latest film from the front lines. He hasn’t seen the Captain or Bucky or any of the Howling Commandos in nearly a month and he tries not to let Philips see his relief when the film starts and it shows them all whole and mostly safe.

Then Captain Carter takes off her helmet and the camera zooms in on what’s tucked inside: the photo of Steve that has been missing from his personnel file for the last few months.

Philips turns away to smirk at the wall and Steve is fairly sure he would rather sink through the floor.

 

 

 

 

She finds him in the supply tent the night before they’re going to hit the last Hydra site. He was supposed to be making sure that everyone’s guns are clean and in proper working order, outfitting the Howling Commandos to fighting weight, but instead she finds him cinching a holster around his own skinny waist, the weight of the gun on his hip threatening to pull his pants down to his knees.

“What in heaven’s name are you doing?”

“I’m going with you,” he says stubbornly without looking up. She’s learned over the past year that his hearing is about as good as his lungs, but he always seems to know when she’s near.

“To Schmidt?”

“Captain Philips and the rest of the 107th is your back-up,” he reminds her. “I’m a part of that. I need to be.”

“Seen any action recently?” she asks pointedly.

His ears burn red: “Captain, please, this is my job.”

“I’ve read your file.”

“Of course you have,” he mumbles and starts to take off the holster. If she’s read his file, she knows that he flunked every physical he was given, that he nearly broke his arm on the recoil during his munitions test, that he can’t even do a dozen push-ups without having an asthma attack. She’s been teaching him how to shoot in their sparse downtime over the past few months - she thought, perhaps, he might be useful as a sniper, away from the fray of the fighting - but he still struggles with the recoil on the rifle, his shoulder bruised and battered. It was only Erskine’s intervention at the inception of the project that got him on Philip’s strategy team, his brain making up for his distinct lack of brawn.

“If I asked,” she says quietly, stepping into his personal space, “would you stay behind?”

He gives the question the consideration its due. “You wouldn’t ask,” he answers eventually.

“No, no I wouldn’t.” Her hand twitches at her side, like maybe she wants to touch him or hold him or anything besides tower over him with a box of ammunition between their feet. Instead she walks backwards out of the supply tent: “Take care of yourself, Rogers.”

 

 

 

 

“Dancing?” Steve’s eyebrows disappear under the hair that flops down over his forehead. “You want– you’re asking me to dance?”

“We’ve discussed it before.” They did. She knows they did. Surely she couldn’t have read all of those conversations wrong.

“In a way. I just never, I mean, I never thought that _you_ – I mean, _I’m_ just…” he swallows heavily, shifting on his feet, then smiles up at her, a little sad around the eyes. “C'mon, Cap, I have no coordination. I know you wouldn’t mean to, but I’d screw it up and then you’d step on me and then who would Phillips send on coffee runs?”

She wonders suddenly if she wasn’t Captain Carter - if she wasn’t the leader of the Howling Commandos, if she hadn’t stepped out of Project Rebirth six inches taller and a perfect specimen of physical health - if Steve would be so quick to put himself down. It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to her that her advancement has never caused him to resent her in any way, but only served to make him feel more inadequate than he felt in the first place.

She grabs his hand and pulls him down the hall to an unused conference room, the table still strewn with maps and broken pencils. Someone will be by to clean it up eventually - or maybe not, with the war finally over - but they won’t be in tonight: tonight is for celebrating. Nearly everyone else is out at a pub already. She closes the door and locks it behind them and Steve makes a funny little noise of protest in the back of his throat.

“Captain?”

“We’ll practice,” she says firmly. “Until you’re comfortable enough to go into town.”

“Practice dancing,” he repeats, like he can’t understand a word she’s saying. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? The Howling Commandos, any one of the men out there that you fought beside, they’d kill their grandmothers to take you out dancing tonight.”

“But they’re not the right partner for me.” She takes a step forward and he unconsciously takes one back, not because he’s intimidated but because it hurts his neck to look up that far. He just stares at her for a minute and she realizes once again that there is a distinct difference between the way that Steve Rogers looks at her and the way every other man in the SSR does. The men, her comrades in arms, see Captain Carter; Steve Rogers sees Peggy Carter.

“So,” he clears his throat and wrings his hands. “So what do I do? To dance, I mean.”

She holds out her hand and he takes it gently, his small pale hand cold in her larger, scarred one. She tugs him toward her.

“Stand on my feet,” she says. “We’ll start there.”


End file.
